March 28, 2015A little bot of Q&A about the Footwear Guild… and a little bit about the Symposium

First we decided that we want to announce only in the symposium, but then after a few weeks of hesitation we wanted to give a chance to those who want to be founding members to be there in this historic moment.

So, here is a little Q&A – more will come as I receive more questions.

1. Is there any chance to watch online?
No. This is something unique. You need to be there to participate. We want to move this huge online community out f those comfy chairs to off-line, meet each others, make friends, learn new things, share experience, have conversations.

2. Is this an annual thing?
Yes. We plan like that, although if you don’t come because you only want to come next year… we might end up with a lot of potential, next-year visitors and a very few actual ones – that might not inspire us to do it again. So, if you can come – come.

3. What is the purpose of the Guild?
We made a long way with this craft with this forum, which is – not enough. We have 5579 members as of now – most of them just plan to make shoes in the future, some of them don’t find teachers, materials, need some more support than an online forum. With a Guild we can help, organize and promote education on a good level. This is very important. From the dozens of courses I would only suggest a few. Helping education will be our most important job. We, as a Guild also can build contacts with companies, association, we can receive help, we can do steps to preserve our common knowledge and most importantly – dosomething more than just talk – things, what we could never do as an invisible online community.

4. Why do we organize a symposium?

Simply… because we need this badly. Yes, there are a lot of other conferences, symposiums, meet-ups, although those are not ours. Not about our problems, our chances to change the future – and as a matter of fact not even about our topics specifically.

For the record: doing this is a brave step from us. Moving out a bunch of online people to do something physically is crazy hard. This will kind of separate those who are really want to do something for our craft, who really belong to the craft from those who have other important things – no offense please.

5. Can I register to be a member of the Guild?

Of course, as soon as we found it, but not automatically. We take that whoever comes to the Symposium is a serious footwear maker, but we will filter the applicants later on – this will not be an Internet group, we don’t want to be just another patch on someone’s jacket.

6. What is the other big announcement?

Well, that is… oh, almost I fell. 🙂 It will be really big, even bigger than the Guild, I promise.